Former surgeon general recalled as humble

Tri-City director worked with Koop

Oceanside  Years before he rose to become the U.S. Surgeon General, C. Everett Koop was an innovative physician who, though serious about his profession, remained intensely humble, said an Oceanside health care leader who once worked with him.

Tri-City Healthcare District board member RoseMarie Reno said she worked with Koop from 1958 to 1960 when she was a nurse at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Koop, who later served as surgeon general from 1982 to 1989, died Monday at age 96.

Reno said Tuesday that at The Children’s Hospital, Koop was chief surgeon who performed delicate surgery on infants born with heart defects.

“His demeanor was very calm, very professional, even in the operating room,” said Reno, “Sometimes in the operating room today, you get a lot of joking, kidding around. We didn’t find that too much. It was all seriousness.”

She recalled that Koop and two of his colleagues developed a treatment for helping babies recover from surgery — a crib with a special tent over the top.

“At the end of the crib, they had a unit with oxygen flowing over ice,” Reno said. “It was like a mist flowing over the crib.”

The purpose of the contraption was to keep a baby’s temperature down “to heal more quickly,” Reno said.

“He was ahead of his time, indeed, he was certainly ahead of his time,” she said.

Out of the operating room, Koop took a personal interest in his patients.

“Every case to him was individualized and he took care of every child as though it were his own,” Reno said.

She said Koop also had a close affinity with those he worked with.

At the annual Christmas party “he would joke and join us and just be one of us,” Reno said. “He was a humble man at heart the way I knew him, very humble.”

Well respected by his colleagues, Koop did not brag of his accomplishments, Reno said.

“The man was a very well educated man. He was not a boastful man. When he was talking, he was not boastful. He spoke with an eloquence that was based on fact and research,” she said. “I looked on him as a professor who based his opinions on fact and knowledge.”

When Koop was appointed surgeon general, Reno said “I thought he deserved it.”

“He took his medical education to heart and he did something with it, he made things happen,” Reno said.

Although she lost touch with Koop, Reno said she ran into him several years ago at a medical gathering in San Diego and much to her surprise, he remembered her by name.

“I consider myself fortunate to have known him, to have worked with him and to have the experience in my lifetime to be associated with Dr. Koop,” Reno said. “To me, this was such an honor.”